Analysis | Power Up: This GOP senator wants to overhaul unions in America (2024)

with Tobi Raji

🚨 Another mass shooting: “A gunman killed eight people and then himself at a FedEx facility in Indianapolis late Thursday, in a mass shooting that left several others injured, authorities said,” The Post's Teo Armus and Timothy Bella report.

ICYMI: “How the Justice Department came to investigate Rep. Matt Gaetz,” from our Matt Zapotosky and Michael Scherer.

The policies

• Also, Canada: “In some places, unions manage functions like unemployment insurance and job training that we take for granted as government responsibilities. In Canada, collective bargaining offers the parties autonomy to depart from government mandates in regulating their own workplaces,” the letter states. “Conservatives should be willing to consider all these approaches, and others besides.”

• Harry Holzer, a Georgetown University public policy professor and the former chief economist for the Clinton Labor Department, said he didn't want to “sell out the idea of work councils” but “can't imagine any Republicans would support that because [the GOP is] so anathema to unions.”
• “And I don't think unions will be impressed by what Rubio has done, when push comes to shove,” Holzer added.
• Susan Houseman, Upjohn Institute for Employment Research vice president and director of research, commended Rubio's efforts and said broadly increasing worker representation through structures used overseas like works councils or co-determination is “a bold proposal for somebody who is very conservative to be considering.”
• “The decline of unions [has] been linked to the rise of inequality in the U.S. and inequality has grown in other countries but not to the same degree,” Houseman argued. “But such a proposal will be strongly opposed in board rooms so I think it'd be tough.”

• “We’re focused on building a new type of labor movement where we don’t rely on the election process to raise standards,” Jesse Case, secretary-treasurer of an Iowa Teamsters local working to rally the state’s Amazon drivers and warehouse workers, told the New York Times's Noam Scheiber.
• “Labor law, as currently written, greatly hamstrings unions and their formation,” Matt Dimick, a professor at the Buffalo School of Law, told Power Up. “Perhaps the greatest limitation in the current law is that it prevents a union from doing anything to demonstrate its efficacy before workers are asked to vote for to recognize the union as their bargaining representative.”
• “Thus, when workers vote for a union, they are asked to place their trust in an organization that has been — literally — prohibited from demonstrating that they can do anything to help them,” Dimick added.

• The loss in Bessemer “can be an opportunity to look beyond the PRO Act and why we need labor law with a focus on the sector,” Larry Cohen, chairman of the progressive advocacy group Our Revolution and a former president of the Communications Workers of America, told Scheiber.
• “It would be incredibly powerful if Biden and Secretary of Labor Marty Walsh called on McDonald’s and Amazon and other major corporations to set a bargaining table with workers and government and they would help support it,” Mary Kay Henry, president of the Service Employees International Union, told him.

On the Hill

• “House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said that she has ‘no plans’ to bring the bill to the floor and that she supports a commission created by President Biden that will produce a report this year on possible changes to the court, including expansion and term limits.”
• But she didn’t close the door completely.“It is not out of the question. It has been done before in the history of our country, a long time ago. The size of our country, the growth of our challenges in terms of our economy, etcetera, might necessitate such a thing,” Pelosi said.

• “Then came Trump, who campaigned on a promise to put America first, an isolationist mantra that resonated with a nation weary of endless wars.”
• “Now, out of power in Washington, Republicans have splintered into disparate factions, with few figures to take the lead.”
• Ouch: “'Boy, I’m hard-pressed,'” said Chuck Hagel, the former Republican senator, when asked to name a G.O.P. foreign policy expert in the Senate," per the Times. “'The emphasis on foreign policy probably hasn’t been the same with senators. But I can’t think of a Dick Lugar or a John Warner or any of the guys I served with,'" he said, referring to the former Republican senators from Indiana and Virginia.

The investigations

• Training is not an afterthought. “If you want to invest dollars, that’s the place to invest it: training,” Bolton said. “To be truly effective, you have to have that continuous training.”
• Expand the force’s intelligence capabilities. “We need an intelligence bureau. Right now it's considered an intelligence division. It needs to be a full-service, comprehensive bureau.”
• “The testimony from Bolton was the latest in a series of damaging revelations about the missteps and dysfunction that plagued the force’s response to the deadliest attack on the Capitol in more than 200 years,” the New York Times's Luke Broadwater reports.

• 17 requests in 78 minutes:Our Post colleagues reconstruct the failures of planning and preparation that left police at the Capitol severely disadvantaged on Jan. 6.

The campaign

• “The ballots will be scrutinized not by election officials, but by a group of private companies led by a private Florida-based firm whose owner has promoted claims that the 2020 election was fraudulent.”
• “The recount has sparked an internecine fight among state Republicans,with the GOP-led Maricopa County Board of Supervisors refusing to assist the effort, saying multiple past reviews have already demonstrated the election was run properly. And it has triggered deep fears among Democrats and voting-rights groups that the process could further election conspiracies that led to violence on Jan. 6.”
• “There are people who have been looking for any reason to get their hands on all of the ballots. Now they've gotten their chance — and we don't know what they're going to do with it,” Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs (D), whose office is in charge of state elections, told our colleague. “Hobbs said she is examining possible legal options to stop the process.”

Outside the Beltway

• “The graphic video, which the city's Civilian Office of Police Accountability (COPA) posted to its website, shows the police officer chasing Adam through an alley, ordering him to stop and show his hands. Adam appears to stop at the opening in a fence, turn and raise his hands as the officer fires once, striking him in the chest.”
• “Adam is among the youngestpeople fatally shot by police since The Post began tracking police shootings in 2015. The only younger people were two 6-year-olds and a 12-year-old, all of whom were unarmed. Adam is first person younger than 14 shot and killed by police since 2017.”

• “He had a big imagination and curiosity since he was a little baby. He was goofy and always cracking jokes, making everyone laugh. He loved animals and riding his bike,” Adam's mother, Elizabeth Toledo, said in a statement per the Chicago Sun-Times.
• “Adam was really into zombies. And the zombie apocalypse. He even had this zombie apocalypse bag packed and ready to go. Some of his favorite movies and TV shows were ‘Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs,’ ‘Ghostbusters,’ ‘SpongeBob SquarePants,’ ‘Toy Story,’ ‘Cars,’ ‘The Walking Dead,’” she said.

Global power

• “The coveted first invitationis intended to reward a strategic ally who was buffeted by transactional and sometimes capricious treatment under Trump, and to send a signal to China that Biden plans to firm up America’s Asian alliances.”
• The agenda:“A variety of Chinese actions, including military moves in the South China Sea and perceived threats to Taiwan are on the agenda, along with human rights concerns … Biden and Suga are also expected to discuss Biden’s strategy review on nuclear-armed North Korea.”
• More:“Biden and Suga are expected to issue a joint statement that contains unusually strong language about Chinese actions in the Taiwan Strait. Tensions have mounted in the strait over the past year, and China appeared to threaten invasion last fall.”

In the media

• The small world of trauma:From Emmett Till to Daunte Wright, the eerie ties among Black victims of violence. By The Post’s Sydney Trent.
• ‘You have some f---ing nerve shutting us off during a pandemic!’:Off the grid: A flood of federal aid often fails to reach America’s poorest families. By The Post’s Greg Jaffe.
• Holding onto power:Andrew Cuomo’s white-knuckle ride. By the New York Times Magazine’s Matt Flegenheimer.
• ‘Can I hold my daughter?’:These parents had to bond with their babies over Zoom — or lose them forever. By the 19th*’s Eli Hager.
• All news is local news: Caron Nazario saw Eric Garner, who he called ‘uncle,’ die in police hands. Then officers pepper-sprayed him six years later. By The Post’s John Woodrow Cox and Michael S. Rosenwald.
• America’s ‘Forever War’ visualized: The war in Afghanistan: America’s longest conflict in photos. By The Post’s Nick Kirkpatrick, Craig Whitlock and Julie Vitkovskaya.
• Weird news: A woman called animal control on a croissant. By the New Yorker’s Amanda Arnold.

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